For this exhibition, projections of digital images of photographs of Ed Ruscha’s painting ‘Oof’ (1962; reworked 1963; MoMA, New York)* continually crossfade over each other (with live updates that intersperse the latest images of people viewing the work at MoMA) on the wall where it was projected during an opening keynote lecture: ‘Historical Ontology of Art’, at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, on the 17th of January, 2019, as part of the Fourteenth International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Art. Discourses of Art - Discourses of the World’, hosted by The International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory, a periodical event organised by Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo, that aims to promote a critical discussion on contemporary art.

‘Oof’ is part of a series of paintings Ruscha made in the 1960s exploring the possibilities of language as stand-ins for the properties of representations of their visual counterparts, in the process becoming signs of images, and images of (hand-painted) signs (from which they are stylistically derived or constituted), floating freely on a single-coloured background, unattached to a specific context.